Defeated at trial, KBR rape accuser sticks to her story

By Mike Tolson |
October 3, 2011
| Updated: October 3, 2011 12:02am

Husband Kallan Daigle was beside her and attorney Todd Kelly was behind her when Jamie Leigh Jones' civil trial against KBR got under way June 14 in Houston.

Photo By Chip Somodevilla

In 2007, Jones testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

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Editor's note

Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson reviewed the complete trial transcript and much of the evidence in the preparation of this story. Neither Jamie Leigh Jones nor her attorney, Todd Kelly, would agree to an interview. Kelly did offer a formal statement via email: "While we respect the jury's findings, we feel that the outcome would have been different if we had been permitted to inform them that Charles Bortz had battered two other women after assaulting Jamie. Unfortunately, we were not permitted to tell them that, although Jamie's medical history from her pre-teen years was shown to the jury. Although we are disappointed in the outcome of this trial, we appreciate that we were able to get the case to a jury."

Key events in the story of Jamie Leigh Jones

July 25, 2005: Jamie Leigh Jones arrives at Camp Hope in Baghdad. She is hired to do IT work at the KBR facility, which was contracted to support the State Department's mission in Iraq.

July 28, 2005: Jones awakes in her room in a Camp Hope barracks with firefighter Charles Bortz in one of her beds. The two had been drinking together the night before. She says at first she does not recall what they did in her room, but later in the day claims she was raped by Bortz and several other KBR firefighters.

Aug. 1, 2005: Jones returns to Houston. She is on leave from KBR.

May 16, 2007: Jones files a federal lawsuit against Halliburton, KBR, Charles Bortz, several "John Doe Rapists" and a previous KBR supervisor. The suit is filed in Beaumont, and does not attract immediate attention from the news media.

Dec. 11, 2007: Jones' allegations begin to make news nationwide as she goes public. She gives several television interviews, including on ABC's 20/20 and MSNBC's Live with Dan Abrams.

Dec. 19, 2007: Jones testifies before the House Judiciary Committee and gives her account of the alleged "attack" in Baghdad.

April 9, 2008: Jones is given an award from Congress for raising public awareness of contract employees who are victimized while working overseas.

Sept. 15, 2009: A panel of judges from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that Jones' lawsuit can proceed to trial and does not have to be settled through arbitration, as per a clause in her employment contract. The ruling upholds a decision by a district judge who determined that the alleged assault had taken place outside the course and scope of her work.

Oct. 6, 2009: The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approves an amendment sponsored by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., that will deny defense department contracts to companies that require employees to settle sexual assault and harassment claims through binding arbitration. Jones has made speeches and appearances advocating Franken's amendment.

June 16, 2011: Jones' trial begins in the federal courthouse in downtown Houston. A number of Jones' complaints are tossed out before the trial for lack of evidence, leaving only the matter of whether she was raped and whether KBR had fraudulently induced her to sign her employment contract.

July 8, 2011: A jury rules in favor of KBR, finding that no rape had taken place and there was no fraudulent inducement.

Aug. 17, 2011: KBR files a petition asking that U.S. District Judge Kent Ellison award the company attorney's fees of more than $2 million. KBR claims Jones' allegations were fabricated and malicious, and that her lawsuit was shown to be frivolous.

As she awoke on her fifth morning in Camp Hope, the perversely named home away from home for more than 700 KBR employees in Baghdad, Jamie Leigh Jones was no happy camper. There was a naked man in her room and she didn't feel so good.

The impromptu party of the night before was still with her, in her head and in her bed. She couldn't get up when her alarm went off, so she wasn't ready when one of her co-workers came by to give her a ride to work. The fellow she had spent the night with made apologies to the fellow at her door and sent him on his way.

Jones didn't seem to know what to make of the man, now in his underwear, as she tried to pull herself together. He was a KBR firefighter named Charles Bortz - she knew that. And she recalled flirting and drinking with him the night before, and the night before that. But she seemed fuzzy on the details.

"Did we have sex last night?" she finally asked.

Over the next six years, the answer to that question and all that it came to imply would increasingly dominate Jones' life, and ultimately become a national metaphor for a war with vast collateral damage. At the time, though, it just seemed like an odd thing to say. Bortz was annoyed.

"Are you serious?" he asked. "That's not funny."

Later that morning Jones was telling company officials she had been raped. Bortz was dumbstruck, or so said those who saw him. The two had seemed smitten with each other since they met. Bortz had talked to her the night before about breaking up with his girlfriend, another Camp Hope worker, so the two of them could start a relationship. Now he was a vicious attacker?

So it appeared, but not right away. It was a few hours later - after she had gone to work, spoken to Bortz on the phone and had a little time to think - that she reported to her bosses that the sex that Bortz remembered as normal was not just a rape but a gang rape, facilitated by a drug slipped into her drink.

After she left Iraq, Jones had added a layer of corporate savagery to the physical violence. She claimed she was imprisoned by KBR in a "container" and held incommunicado under armed guard while being threatened. Denied food and water, she was able to get help only after a friendly guard slipped her a cellphone so she could call her father, who in turn called a Houston congressman, whose entreaties with the State Department ultimately rescued her.

It was a great story, in a terrible sort of way, and the news media jumped at the chance to tell it after she filed a $145 million federal lawsuit in 2007 that named Bortz and KBR, which she accused of various acts of negligence as well as sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment.

Jones testified before Congress. She appeared on national TV. She started her own foundation. To the astonishment of some who saw her on that broiling morning in Baghdad in July 2005, the petite former Girl Scout became a very public profile in courage, leaving little doubt that when she finally got a chance to tell her tale in a courtroom, the result would be a triumphant final chapter.

KBR was quickly cast as the evil corporate villain, a force of darkness that tolerated monsters in its midst. Had reporters done what reporters typically do - dig for facts - they might have gradually uncovered a raft of details that put Jones' claims in a different light. They could have learned that the combined recollection of virtually every KBR employee who dealt with Jones that day described a different version of events. That company records seemed at odds with Jones' memory on many points. That medical evidence did not support her descriptions of her injuries or her claim of being drugged. That previous diagnoses by her own doctors in Houston said she suffered from a psychosomatic illness that included faking some symptoms.

But the media turned the story over to Jones and her lawyer. With the insurgency in Iraq at full tilt and KBR getting its share of bad press, Jones struck a chord. Hers was a cautionary tale about what happens when a naive young woman barely out of high school suddenly is plunged into a world marked by cruelty at every turn.

Jones appeared comfortable with the publicity. But she also wanted justice - from a jury, with a verdict.

It galled her that Bortz was never prosecuted. The State Department and a federal grand jury in Florida each concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge him. It galled her even more that her employment contract dictated that workplace sexual harassment claims had to be settled through arbitration. Jones demanded her day in court to tell her story. Finally, after federal judges agreed that her company-owned housing was not part of the workplace, she got her wish.

"After six years of fighting to be here, Jamie is happy to be able to put her trust in a jury," said her attorney, Todd Kelly, as the trial got under way in a federal courtroom in Houston. "She looks forward to their verdict."

Several weeks later, having heard almost three dozen witnesses, the jury spent about 10 hours reviewing the evidence, asked a few questions about her contract, and rejected her claim. Jones wept.

Her supporters railed against the verdict, complaining that once again a victim had been put on trial. But for all Jones' determination to get into court, the picture KBR's lawyers persuasively presented was of a troubled woman prone to unsubstantiated claims and mysterious memory lapses.

If the trial outcome was shocking, perhaps it's because so many people wanted it to be true in the first place. Who better than the soft-spoken young Texas woman to serve as a symbol for a war gone wrong? The perfect victim had risen up against the perfect villain.

•••

As a low-level IT contract worker for KBR, Jones arrived in Iraq in July 2005 with modest goals. She wanted to make some money (her salary was $110,000) and she wanted to have a little fun while doing it. Granted, her new home, the infamous Green Zone in downtown Baghdad, was no pleasure garden. Occasional mortar attacks and explosions were a reminder that Iraq was still very much a combat environment. But Jones appeared to have other things on her mind as she rode into Camp Hope with a company supervisor.

The subject of alcohol came up - Camp Hope was the only KBR support facility where drinking was allowed - and Jones made a point of stressing she was 22. Her first purchase in Iraq was a bottle of vodka.

On her third night there, Jones had a few drinks with some of her new co-workers. And a few more on her fourth. Then came the morning of the fifth. It dawned as a typical post-party day, complete with fuzzy head and balky stomach, and in a sense only ended six years later when she faced a Houston jury from the witness box.

Jones said she was "100 percent" sure Bortz had raped her, and she blamed KBR for creating an environment where that could happen.

"No one wants this," she testified. "But having my entire life exposed, every bad thing I've ever done or every little inconsistency I may have told, having that - even my STDs shown to the world - if that's the only sacrifice that I have to make to make KBR stop doing this to people, and so that the jury can decide that they need to stop, then it will all be worth it."

After three days on the stand, her allegations came face to face with the report of the Army doctor who examined her an hour or two after she mentioned the rape. There was no physical sign of any beating, no complaint at that time by Jones of injury to her chest, little indication of bleeding and no finding by a toxicology screen of any date-rape drug in her system. There was evidence only that sexual intercourse had occurred, and of two minor bruises that might be unrelated to any sexual activity.

On the witness stand, Jones testified that she was unable to talk to the doctor during the exam because she was too shaken. But both the doctor, Jodi Schultz, and a physician assistant who was present said Jones spoke clearly to them, claiming that she had been raped by multiple men.

"She seemed to flip-flop back and forth and change her story several times as to how many men were present, and she seemed to be concerned about whether or not someone was going to get in trouble," Kristen Rumba, the physician assistant, testified. "And she did not want to give any names."

Jones' explanation at trial for her behavior that morning - her apparent normalcy, her chatty emails, the hours that it took to come forward with a story - focused on the drug she had been given the night before. She was still groggy and struggling to remember, she said.

"Very out of it," she testified. "I think it was still the effects of the drug." Asked why she had said nothing to Pete Arroyo, a supervisor with whom she had struck up a friendship, she said she was still putting the pieces together. "You look into your mind and you try to reach for anything that you could possibly remember. Anything. Just to get some answers."

"Did you find those answers, Jamie?" asked her attorney, Kelly.

"No. And I wanted to make damn sure, before I was going to call this man a rapist, that he raped me. And it took a few hours before I was cognizant enough to make that kind of decision," she said.

But absent any circumstantial or forensic evidence of an assault, jurors were left to weigh the credibility of the woman making the claim. KBR's attorneys, having combed through her medical history, made sure the jurors heard plenty more to put that credibility in doubt.

In September 2004, for example, only 10 months before going to Iraq, she was hospitalized after complaining that she was having spells where she would pass out and not remember what had happened. She had previously mentioned to a doctor that she thought she had passed out while drinking and may have had sex with her date. And yet another doctor diagnosed her with a possible psychosomatic illness in 2002 to explain myriad symptoms that had no apparent cause, some of which personnel said she was faking.

Fast-forward to 2007, months before Jones embarked on a virtual publicity tour to tell her story of gang rape in Iraq and to promote her lawsuit. One April evening, she accused her new husband, Kallan Daigle, of assaulting her during a drunken quarrel at a San Diego bowling alley. She told police, paramedics and emergency room doctors conflicting versions of what had happened and why. Then she told a military investigator that she had made the assault story up, which she admitted at trial was yet another lie.

One more troubling recantation was described in the State Department's report of its investigation into the alleged rape. One of its agents said Jones admitted to them that she had fabricated the story of the gang rape when speaking with the Army doctor Schultz about what happened the previous night because (Schultz) was "pressuring her for a story about what happened."

Asked about these various statements and inconsistencies over the years, Jones insisted that those writing down what she said - from police to investigators to her own doctors - simply misunderstood what she was telling them.

"I can't be responsible for what they wrote," she testified. "You don't ever know what a doctor is going to write down. And sometimes they take your words and turn them around and then you're held accountable for it."

•••

The brave figure who had convincingly related her tale on television and to Congress began to look like something else when evidence from her past was added to the mix. Her cross-examination did not sit well with Jones' supporters, who complained that the company had no right to put her life under a microscope. But KBR's lawyers did not have to look all that far.

One small piece of her personal history was a standard KBR medical form that she filled out before being sent to Iraq in July 2005. It asked about previous medical ailments, conditions and treatments. Jones admitted at trial she had been less than forthcoming. Among her omissions was any mention of depression, anxiety, anemia, seizure disorder, dizziness, frequent headaches, pelvic pain, abdominal pain, stomach problems, back pain, chest pain and hearing loss - all of which she had complained of to doctors in preceding years. The company was not told of the suite of psychiatric medications doctors had prescribed to help her.

Nor did Jones mention to KBR her hospitalization for the possible psychosomatic illness while she was in high school. Records of that hospital stay indicate she told a physical therapist there that she had been sexually harassed by her boss when she worked as a waitress, and that the boss had been fired as a result. Asked about that at trial, Jones said someone had just made up the story and stuck it in her medical record.

There was another sexual harassment allegation, however, regarding a relationship that she'd had with a supervisor at KBR in Houston before she went to Iraq. This time it was not rape per se, she testified, but an intimate relationship that became a quid pro quo for her continued employment.

Jones testified that she had to "pretend" to be the supervisor's girlfriend. Asked by KBR lawyers why there were photos of the two together in which she was smiling and appeared to be enjoying herself, she said it was all an act. Same with her emails that betrayed no hint of an unwanted relationship. She acknowledged that even her mother, with whom she was living at the time, was unaware that Jones was really "trapped" in the relationship and only pretending to be happy.

"The things I had to do to keep my job, I hate myself for," Jones testified. "I had a car payment. I had to help my mother with bills. I had all this responsibility, and I couldn't leave. And I just felt like he took advantage of me in the worst way."

Jurors might have wondered why Jones would sign up for a KBR tour in Iraq if the company did nothing following this earlier sexual harassment complaint. They might have been equally mystified why, after returning home from Iraq, site of the worst event in her life, Jones contacted KBR to see if she might be allowed to go back to Baghdad. (The company declined, calling the request "premature.")

Precisely why Jones was determined to assert this series of terrible events with so little in the way of supporting evidence was a question without answer until the testimony of a forensic psychiatrist in the final days of the trial.

Victor Scarano, an independent expert appointed by the court, examined thousands of pages of records, reports and depositions, some not in evidence, then wrote a 224-page opinion. Scarano concluded that Jones had a classic narcissistic, histrionic and hysterical personality disorder. Jones' inconsistent and contradictory stories, selective memory, exaggerations, misstatements of verifiable and sometimes insignificant facts - she claimed to have graduated from high school at 16, two years before she did - all meshed perfectly with this personality type, he testified.

Such a personality, Scarano said, avoids the truth if they don't like it.

"They never take responsibility themselves," he testified. "Anything that you can bring up that shows negatively on a narcissistic, histrionic, hysterical type of person, they will then shove that responsibility on to somebody else."

At the end of a four-year period in the public eye that included countless interviews and appearances and sustained advocacy for herself and other sexual assault victims, Jones v. KBR really boiled down to Jones vs. the world. Though other women had complained about sexual assault and harassment both in Iraq and within KBR, no witnesses came forward to support any significant element of her story.

Despite the verdict, however, many still believe her, including some bloggers, some advocates for assault victims and Houston Congressman Ted Poe, her champion from the beginning. Poe said he had not looked at the evidence but based his opinion on "her personal story to me."

The trial brought a small measure of vindication for KBR, which had put out a press release in October 2009 outlining the discrepancies in Jones' story and had been castigated for disparaging a victim. But the company also suffered a significant loss, worse than the PR hit it took, when Congress passed a law forbidding government contractors from using arbitration to settle claims of sexual harassment. Foes of mandatory arbitration, which include consumer groups and trial lawyers, say this is a lasting good that came from Jones' efforts to tell her story. Business groups say it's mostly a boon for lawyers.

News outlets that had trumpeted her claims gave the verdict small notice. A few - mostly conservative - commentators pointed out the injustice of a rush to judgment, but those who did the rushing were not heard from.

As for Jones, she's gotten married, had two children and obtained two college degrees since she left Iraq. Her story was recently included in the HBO documentary Hot Coffee, and she still insists that the jury simply did not see the full picture. All the those doctors and therapists and investigators and others putting together reports over the years had gotten it wrong and misunderstood what she had said or meant. KBR may have prevailed at trial, but she is certain of what she knows.